Published by Top Shelf, 2019, 208 pages. After the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941, the US government declared that all people of Japanese origin were “enemy aliens”, including those who were US citizens. They were rounded up and incarcerated. The assumption was that their race made them “nonassimilable” and …
Category: Non-Fiction
A Sky the Color of Chaos: M.J. Fièvre
Published by Beating Windward Press, 2014, 178 pages. “My life was a deconstructed text, and I was surrounded by words—their sustaining luxuries and dangers. Words have power; you never know what may come of them. Take this: I want to leave—the rest is a jigsaw of memory taking up space in my head. I want …
Les années: Annie Ernaux
Published by folio, 2008, 254 pages. Published in English as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017. Translated from French by Alison L. Strayer. “All the images will disappear. ...“—all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to …
Nature Cure: Richard Mabey
Published by Vintage, 2005, 228 pages. “My past, or lack of it, had caught up with me. I’d been bogged down in the same place for too long, trapped by habits and memories. I was clotted with rootedness. And in the end I’d fallen ill and run out of words. My Irish grandfather, a day-worker …
A Book of Days: Patti Smith
Published by Bloomsbury, 2022, 386 pages. This is a book that keeps giving. The multi-talented Patti Smith—singer, songwriter, photographer, author, painter—has put together a collection of photographs (most of them taken by Smith with her 250 Land Camera), one for each day of the year. This book came from her Instagram account, which she started …
Wild Coast—Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge: John Gimlette
Published by Profile Books, 2011, 384 pages.Review by Rishad Patell A difficult book to review. On one hand, John Gimlette’s book on the northern coast of South America provides a great deal of insight into the countries of Guyana and Suriname and the French department of French Guiana. Often ignored in travel writing and rarely …
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The Black Count—Napoleon’s Rival and the Real Count of Monte Cristo–General Alexandre Dumas: Tom Reiss
Published by Vintage / Crown, 2012, 414 pages. Published in the US as The Black Count—Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo We know Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as a work of fiction. But he based a lot of it on the life of his father, also Alexandre …
Brer Rabbit Retold: Arthur Flowers, illustrated by Jagdish Chitara
Published by Tara Books, 2017, 74 pages. In the late 1800s, Joel Chandler Harris collected stories told by slaves in the southern United States, which he later published. In his version, the stories are told to a little white boy by Uncle Remus, a genial, happy slave, who recounts the adventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer …
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Reading the World—How I Read a Book from Every Country: Ann Morgan
Published by Vintage / Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022, 388 pages. First published in 2015. US title: The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe “Reading is a solitary act, but one that demands connection to the world.”—Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History “The world was changing. And its books were changing me.” …
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Fireflies: Luis Sagasti
Translated from Spanish by Fionn PetchPublished by Charco Press, 2017, 97 pages. Original version published in 2011. “Ever since people raised their heads for the first time to observe the stars and began telling them apart by nothing more than the invisible threads of frozen silver that link them, they also began to tell stories.” …
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